The game of golf is an increasingly popular sport at both the amateur and professional levels. To account for the wide variety of play styles and abilities, it is desirable to produce golf balls having different play characteristics.
Attempts have been made to balance a soft feel with good resilience in a multi-layer golf ball by giving the ball a hardness distribution across two to five discrete layers in such a way as to retain both properties. A harder golf ball will generally achieve greater distances, but less spin, and so will be better for drives but more difficult to control on shorter shots. On the other hand, a softer ball will generally experience more spin, thus being easier to control, but will lack distance. Additionally, certain design characteristics may affect the “feel” of the ball when hit, as well as the durability of the ball.
Three dimensional (3D) printing is a process of making a three-dimensional solid object from a digital model. The printing is an additive process, where successive layers are built upon previous layers to “grow” the object. 3D printing is different from other molding or manufacturing techniques that can rely on filling a mold or removing material such as by cutting or drilling.